Chapter : 1953

  No, she thought. Not again. I am not going to be the reason you lose.

  She looked at the Void Shield protecting the Collector. It was a semi-circle, covering his front and sides. It was black and hungry. It would eat any direct shot.

  But the Collector’s head... his head was right behind hers. If Lloyd shot straight, he would hit her. If he shot to the side, the shield would eat it.

  There was no straight line to the target.

  So, she had to make a crooked line.

  She needed to bounce the shot.

  But there were no mirrors behind the Collector. There was only the stone wall of the greenhouse.

  Wait, she thought. I am the mirror.

  The Collector had said she had a "Solar Core." He said she generated high-density light energy. Earlier, she had used that power to make a laser grid. But light wasn't just for burning. Light was also for reflecting.

  If she could turn her skin into a perfect reflective surface... if she could become a living diamond... she could bounce the shot.

  It was insane. It was dangerous. If her math was wrong by even one degree, the plasma beam would burn a hole right through her chest.

  But she looked at Lloyd. She saw the despair in his eyes. He was eighty years old inside, tired of losing people. He wouldn't take the shot. He needed permission. He needed to trust her.

  Airin took a deep breath. She reached inside her chest, grabbing that ball of solar fire again. But instead of pushing it out, she pulled it in.

  She flooded her skin with mana. She forced the light energy to condense on the surface of her body.

  "Lloyd!" she screamed.

  Her voice startled everyone. Lloyd stopped lowering the cannon. The Collector flinched.

  "Don't do it!" Airin yelled. "Don't put it down!"

  "Quiet, girl!" the Collector hissed, tightening his grip.

  "Listen to me!" Airin shouted, locking eyes with Lloyd. She tried to project her thoughts to him, praying that he remembered the kitchen table. Praying that he remembered the engineer he used to love. "You can't hit him from there! The angle is wrong!"

  Lloyd frowned. Angle? Why was she talking about angles?

  "I am the surface!" Airin yelled. "Do you understand? I am the surface! Use me!"

  Lloyd’s eyes widened. He saw what she was doing.

  Her skin was changing. It wasn't just glowing anymore. It was turning silver. It was becoming smooth and shiny, like polished chrome. Her hair turned from brown to a shimmering, metallic white. Her clothes seemed to stiffen and shine.

  She was casting a spell he had never seen before. It wasn't attack magic. It wasn't defense magic.

  It was [Absolute Refraction].

  She was turning herself into a human mirror.

  "Shoot me!" Airin screamed. "Shoot me right in the chest, Lloyd! Do it!"

  The Collector laughed. "She’s insane! She wants you to kill her! Go ahead! Save me the trouble!"

  But Lloyd wasn't laughing. His brain, the brain of a master tactician and engineer, instantly ran the calculation.

  He saw Airin’s position. She wasn't standing straight. She had twisted her body slightly to the left. Her chest was angled at exactly forty-five degrees relative to him.

  If he fired a beam of light at her chest... and if her skin was truly reflective...

  The beam would hit her. It would bounce off at a ninety-degree angle. It would shoot sideways, bypassing the front of the Void Shield entirely.

  And it would hit the Collector directly in the side of the head.

  It was a bank shot. It was geometry.

  But it required insane trust. If her spell failed, she died. If his aim was off by a millimeter, the reflection would miss the Collector and hit the wall, and the heat would cook them both.

  Lloyd looked at her silver face. He saw the fierce determination in her eyes. She wasn't afraid. She was waiting for him to do his job.

  Trust me, Evan, her eyes seemed to say. I fixed the engine. Now drive the car.

  The hesitation vanished from Lloyd’s soul. The fear was gone.

  He raised the Nova Cannon again.

  He didn't aim at the enemy. He aimed directly at the heart of the woman he loved.

  The barrel whined as it reached maximum charge. The white light became blinding, casting harsh shadows across the ruined greenhouse.

  "Three!" the Collector screamed, seeing the barrel rise. "I'll kill her!"

  Lloyd’s hand was steady. His breath was calm. He locked his sights on the center of her silver chest.

  "Trust," Lloyd whispered.

  Chapter : 1954

  His finger tightened on the trigger.

  ________________________________________

  The air inside the ruined greenhouse felt heavy, charged with a static electricity that made the hair on Lloyd’s arms stand up. The roof was gone, and shards of glass littered the floor like diamonds, but nobody was looking at the wreckage. All eyes were locked on the standoff in the center of the room.

  Lloyd’s finger rested on the trigger mechanism inside the cannon. His heart was hammering against his ribs, beating a frantic rhythm of fear. Every instinct in his body was screaming at him to stop.

  Don't do it, the voice of his fear whispered. If you miss by a fraction of an inch, you will kill her. If her spell fails for even a millisecond, the heat will vaporize her instantly.

  He looked at Airin’s face. Even though her skin was silver, he could see her eyes. They were wide and fierce. They weren't the eyes of a scared student. They were the eyes of a partner who had done the math and knew the plan would work.

  Trust me, her eyes seemed to say. I fixed the engine. Now drive the car.

  Lloyd took a deep breath, letting the air fill his lungs. He forced his hand to stop shaking. He pushed away the fear of the past—the memories of losing people, of failing to protect the ones he loved. He locked those ghosts away in a box in his mind. Right now, he couldn't be a husband or a widower. He had to be an engineer. He had to be a shooter.

  He adjusted his aim. He wasn't pointing the cannon at the Collector. He wasn't trying to curve the shot around the shield. He was pointing the weapon directly at the center of Airin’s chest.

  It was the kind of thing you only saw in pool halls, not on a battlefield.

  "Three!" the Collector yelled, sensing that something was wrong. He saw the light in the cannon barrel getting brighter, reaching critical mass. The whining sound of the charging weapon was deafening now, a high-pitched scream that hurt the ears. "I'm counting! Two!"

  Airin didn't flinch. She stood her ground, offering herself up as the target. She trusted him with her life. She trusted him to be precise.

  Lloyd’s jaw set hard. He stopped thinking about the what-ifs. He stopped thinking about the risk. He simply focused on the geometry. A straight line. A flat surface. A perfect angle.

  He looked at the Collector one last time. The man was sweating, his eyes darting back and forth, trying to understand why Lloyd was aiming at the hostage. The Collector couldn't see the math. He only saw the gun.

  "Trust," Lloyd whispered to himself.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  The recoil was massive. The Nova Arm Cannon kicked back hard against Lloyd’s shoulder, the force of the release driving his boots into the stone floor. The world turned white.

  A beam of pure, blinding plasma erupted from the barrel. It wasn't a bullet; it was a continuous stream of white-hot energy, screaming through the air like acaptured star. It moved faster than sound, faster than thought. It tore through the space between Lloyd and Airin in a fraction of a second.

  To the Collector, it must have looked like madness. He saw the flash. He saw the beam heading straight for the girl he was holding. For a split second, he probably thought he had won—that Lloyd had panicked and missed, or that Lloyd had decided to sacrifice the girl to kill him. He probably braced himself for the impact, tightening his grip on his black shield, ready to absorb the energy that would blast through Airin’s body.

  But the beam didn't go through her.

  It hit Airin’s silver chest with a sound like a crack of thunder.

  For a terrifying microsecond, Lloyd’s heart stopped. He waited for the scream. He waited for the smell of burning flesh. He waited to see her shatter into a thousand pieces.

  But she didn't shatter. She didn't burn.

  The spell held. [Absolute Refraction].

  Her skin acted exactly like a perfect mirror. The beam of plasma hit her surface and was instantly rejected. It couldn't penetrate. It couldn't transfer its heat. It could only do one thing: bounce.

  The white beam hit her chest and snapped to the right. It turned a sharp corner, changing direction instantly. It shot out sideways, blazing a trail of light across the greenhouse.

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  Chapter : 1955

  It bypassed the Void Shield completely. The black wall of darkness was facing forward, ready to eat magic coming from Lloyd. It wasn't ready for magic coming from the side.

  The reflected beam struck the Collector.

  There was no time for him to scream. There was no time for him to beg or bargain. One moment, he was a smug, arrogant man holding a hostage and a time-machine. The next moment, he was gone.

  The beam hit him directly in the temple. The heat was so intense, so concentrated, that it didn't just burn him; it erased him. His head, his shoulder, and his upper torso were vaporized instantly. He didn't explode. He simply ceased to exist. The plasma burned through him and kept going, blasting a hole through the stone wall of the greenhouse behind him.

  The remains of the Collector—his legs and one arm—crumpled to the floor. The black box, the Chronos-Dampener, fell from his dead hand and shattered on the stones.

  The beam cut off as Lloyd released the trigger.

  The blinding light vanished. The screaming noise of the cannon faded into a low hum.

  Silence rushed back into the room.

  Lloyd stood there, breathing heavy, smoke rising from the barrel of his arm. He stared at the spot where the Collector had been. There was nothing left but a scorch mark and a pile of smoking robes.

  Then, his eyes snapped to Airin.

  She was still standing there, frozen in her silver form. She hadn't moved. She looked like a statue made of mercury.

  Slowly, the silver color began to fade. The metallic shine retreated from her skin, replaced by the pale, human color of flesh. Her hair turned back from white to brown. Her clothes softened, becoming fabric again.

  She took a breath. It was a ragged, gasping sound.

  Her knees buckled.

  Lloyd moved. He didn't teleport this time; he just ran. He covered the distance in three long strides, catching her just before she hit the floor.

  Lloyd caught Airin in his left arm, his human arm. His right arm, still transformed into the heavy Nova Cannon, hung uselessly at his side, too hot and too dangerous to touch her with.

  He lowered her gently to the stone floor, ignoring the broken glass that crunched under his knees. He was frantic. His mind was racing through a list of medical emergencies—burns, shock, internal bleeding, mana exhaustion.

  "Airin!" he shouted. "Airin, look at me!"

  She was limp in his arm. Her eyes were half-closed, rolling back slightly in her head. Her skin was incredibly hot to the touch, like she was running a high fever. Steam was actually rising from her clothes where the beam had hit her.

  Lloyd looked at her chest. The front of her Academy uniform was singed and blackened, the fabric burned away in a perfect circle. Underneath, the skin was angry and red, glowing faintly as the last of the solar energy dissipated.

  But there was no hole. There was no blood. The mirror spell had worked. It had reflected 99% of the energy. But even 1% of a plasma beam was enough to cook a person if they weren't careful.

  "Airin, say something," Lloyd pleaded. He tapped her cheek gently. "Come on. Wake up. Don't do this to me."

  For a moment, he wasn't Lloyd Ferrum, the powerful Lord. He was Evan, the man who had lost his wife once and couldn't bear to do it again. The panic that had been locked away in his chest was clawing its way out. He felt helpless. He had the power to kill monsters and build machines, but he didn't know how to fix this.

  Airin groaned. Her eyelids fluttered. She took a deep, shuddering breath and coughed.

  "Ow," she whispered. Her voice was raspy and dry.

  The sound was the most beautiful thing Lloyd had ever heard. The tension in his chest snapped, and he let out a breath he felt like he had been holding for eighty years.

  "You're alive," he said, his voice cracking. "You're okay."

  Airin blinked, her eyes focusing slowly on his face. She looked at him—at the sweat on his forehead, the fear in his eyes, the massive white cannon attached to his arm. A small, weak smile touched her lips.

  "I told you," she whispered. "Angles."

  Lloyd laughed. It was a short, breathless sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. He shook his head, looking at her with a mixture of disbelief and awe.

  Chapter : 1956

  "That was insane," he said. "Do you realize that? That was the craziest, stupidest thing I have ever seen. If you had been off by one degree... if your concentration had slipped for a second..."

  "But it didn't," Airin said. She tried to sit up, wincing as her muscles protested. She felt drained, like she had slept for a week and run a marathon at the same time. "I calculated it. I knew where you were standing."

  Lloyd helped her sit up, supporting her back. He looked at the burn mark on her chest. It looked like a bad sunburn, painful but not life-threatening. She would heal.

  "You calculated the reflection of a plasma beam in the middle of a hostage situation," Lloyd said, shaking his head again. "Who does that? Who thinks like that?"

  "An engineer," Airin said simply. She looked him right in the eye. "Anastasia would have done it."

  The name hung in the air between them. It wasn't a sad name anymore. It was a badge of honor. It was proof.

  Lloyd looked at the smoking crater where the Collector used to be. He looked at the shattered remains of the time machine. He realized that he hadn't won this fight alone. He hadn't saved the damsel in distress. They had won it together. She hadn't just been a victim; she had been the weapon. She had turned herself into the aiming mirror for his gun.

  "Yeah," Lloyd said softly. "She would have."

  He deactivated the Nova Cannon. With a series of mechanical clicks and hisses, the white plates retracted and dissolved into particles of light. His human arm returned, looking normal, though his hand was trembling slightly from the adrenaline dump.

  He reached out and brushed a strand of hair away from Airin’s face. His hand lingered on her cheek. It was a gesture of profound tenderness, something he hadn't allowed himself to do since he woke up in this world.

  "You scared me," he admitted quietly. "I thought I lost you."

  Airin leaned into his touch. The fear of the last hour was fading, replaced by a warm, solid feeling of safety.

  "You didn't lose me," she said. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."

  She looked down at her hands. They were trembling, covered in dust and dried blood from the glass.

  "That wasn't magic, was it?" she asked, looking back at him. "What I did. The mirror skin. That wasn't a spell from a book."

  "No," Lloyd said. "That was something new. That was you using your core to manipulate physics. You didn't cast a spell; you changed the properties of matter. You turned your skin into a superconductor for light."

  He looked at her with a new kind of respect. He wasn't just looking at his past wife. He was looking at a mage of terrifying potential.

  "You are a Battle-Scholar," Lloyd said. "You used science to weaponize magic. The Academy doesn't teach that. Nobody teaches that."

  "Maybe you could teach me," Airin suggested, a spark of mischief returning to her eyes despite the exhaustion.

  Lloyd smiled. "Maybe."

  He stood up and offered her his hand. "Come on. We need to get out of here. The guards will be coming. That shot was loud enough to wake up the whole city."

  Airin took his hand. He pulled her up effortlessly. She swayed on her feet, dizzy, and Lloyd immediately wrapped an arm around her waist to steady her.

  "I've got you," he said.

  They stood there for a moment in the ruins of the greenhouse. The sun was setting now, casting long shadows across the broken glass. It was a scene of destruction, but to them, it felt like a beginning.

  The awkwardness that had existed between them for the last week—the tension of the past life versus the present life—was gone. It had been burned away by the plasma beam. They had faced death together, trusted each other with their lives, and come out the other side.

  They weren't just a teacher and a student anymore. They weren't just ghosts of Evan and Anastasia. They were partners. They were a team.

  "Lloyd," Airin said, looking at the door. "What happens now? People will ask questions. The Collector... he said he was with the Fire Fly Corporation. He said there are more of them."

  Lloyd’s face hardened. The softness vanished, replaced by the cold, calculating look of the Major General.

  "Let them come," Lloyd said. "They thought they could come here and pick us off one by one. They thought we were weak. They thought we were alone."